Search Results: mass shooting

She said she'll never write a book, and she hasn't: that's no book, it's a drop of experience Infused with the spirit of Sabi ... alcoholically she soils God with sour tears. The last time I saw her was in the obituary column: golden as always walking barefoot, cigarette in hand reflecting the sun's anonymity.

'Other countries in response to one mass shooting have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,' said Barack Obama earlier this month. 'Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia — countries like ours.' Thankfully, America is not like Australia. Though many Australians feel a natural envy for our confident, successful cousin, many disturbing developments — Tea Party style politics, anti-immigrant nativism, know-nothing anti-science — have roots traceable to the US.

In July, an NRA article entitled 'Australia: There Will be Blood' described Australia's gun buyback as a 'mass confiscation' that left guns in the hands of criminals and everyone else defenceless. Meanwhile, America has experienced more than one mass shooting per day so far this year. My hope is that we are in that time of unsustainable stasis Malcolm Gladwell talks about, during which nothing seems to be changing, while beneath the surface stability is being eroded, leading to sudden, permanent change.

They are ‘coming to get us’, warns our Prime Minister, adapting the ‘bogey man’ mode of our childhood fears to the contemporary narrative of terrorism and violence. The effect of related intrusions on our daily lives is being gradually dulled. The neoliberal dispensation under which we now live both relies on, and encourages, new episodes of normalisation that go far beyond what we've known in the past.

Mandatory data retention was a bad idea when it was originally floated during a Gillard Government inquiry. It is a worse idea now, and is set to become law for political reasons, not because it has been properly scrutinised. There are important questions that we should be asking, and we should not let ourselves be put off from doing this if we don’t know the difference between data and metadata (there is none).

The shooting down of MH17 by insurgent anti-aircraft missiles has now been swallowed up in the wider drama of the fierce civil war raging in Ukraine's pro-Russian eastern region. On 24 July, the International Committee of the Red Cross proclaimed Ukraine to be in a state of civil war, appealing to all those involved to respect the humanitarian rules of war or face later indictment as war criminals. The burning question now is, what will Putin's Russia do?

I woke up to the news on a Saturday morning. One year ago tomorrow, a man walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire. In the aftermath, gun lobbyists seethed with high indignation that President Barack Obama was politicising a tragedy. It goes to show that the ones who complain about the politicisation of tragedy tend to be the ones who do not want to do anything about it.

We might get lucky. Malcolm Turnbull might be right, and the mass of egos, grievances and interests that make up US-Sino relations might 'evolve into a new order, without either side having to make concessions to the other'. But the risks are growing. In this context the framing of asylum seekers as a threat to our sovereignty seems plain silly. War between China and the US would be a disaster to our national interests.

Gone are the days when Australians believed everyone deserved a fair go: the principle that 'might is right' has replaced the ideals of equity and justice in the national psyche. It is not surprising that after engaging in costly military actions over a decade Australians are more fearful now than when we invaded Iraq in 2003.

Following the latest school massacre US President Obama cited Psalm 147, invoking God to 'heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds', and renewed a call for 'meaningful action'. He'll be judged not on his words, but on how he defines and delivers said 'action'. He'd do well to first revisit Psalm 147 in its entirety.

'You come from a culture where it is okay to kill children,' the Iraqi woman said. We were sheltering against the wall of a building in Fallujah while the city was under attack by US forces. What could I say? There were several little bodies at my feet, bloodied remains laid out on the footpath and covered with thin sheets.

Our gun was not some inanimate piece of metal; it was an object designed with malignant intent, one swiftly transformed into an instrument of violence. The day we handed it in was one of the happiest of my life. It takes a mature society to handle weapons responsibly, and a truly liberated one to relinquish them altogether.